Blue on Black

Summary: Fantasy/Steampunk. Bas is sent to the desert town of Stanslo's Bridge to find the man who killed brilliant gridTech Kimolijah Adani. What he ends up finding is sixteen different kinds of impossible.

Blue on Black 1

It doesn’t start like this:

See, the thing is, it isn’t supposed to go this way.

He’s a goddamned tracker, he’s a goddamned good
tracker, better than anything else the Directorate’s got, and the swagger that
comes with that has been earned a hundred times over, sometimes in blood, though,
okay, let’s not get all maudlin and dramatic. The point is, he’s not supposed
to be caught wrong-footed. And he’s certainly not supposed to be staring
down eight barrels of a spin-cylinder street cannon in the back of a train
station in godforsaken Harrowgate.

“You Barstow?” the man with the gun asks. He’s tall
and rangy, rough-looking and sallow-skinned, with patches of beard going wild
and scraggly. It’s dark and Bas can’t see the rest of his face very well, just
a stubbled sloping chin beneath the shadow cast by his wide-brimmed hat. He
looks tough as rusty nails and just as pleasant.

Steam hugs the ground and wreaths the hem of the
man’s long dirty coat, clings, and thickens the reek of dirt and sweat that
wafts from the man every time he moves. Bas can even smell it through the fug
of smoke and engine grease coming from the station, and all of it combined
pricks at his eyes and makes them water.

There's no cleaner, deeper sense of Tech
beneath any of it—no thick, sundrop yellow mutters of “psyTech” hazing at the
periphery of his vision and scattering something earthy on the back of his
tongue; no blue edging that says “kineTech” and somehow tastes of wet cedar.
Bas’s mind decides “nonTech” before his eyes bother to fully assess his current
situation. Still, though, the gun—Bas can see that just fine.

“Who’s asking?” Bas says from his crouch. He’s
somewhat pissed off, so it comes out a growl.

Smooth, Bas, he tells himself. Keep it smooth.
He can still salvage this.

“I en’t playin’ games.” The housing of the barrels
turns and a cylinder clicks into place. “Are you Barstow?”

Bas peers down at the agent’s body, blood still
seeping in a rivulet from the knife in his throat, the heat catching the chill
of the desert night and wisping steam. Aaron, Bas thinks. The guy’s
name was Aaron.

Bas didn’t know him well. Hadn’t cared to get
to know him. Just another Directorate agent who’d maybe gotten a little too
cocky. It happens.

“Yeah,” says Bas. “Yeah, I’m Barstow.”

He isn’t. No one is, not really. It’s a cover, a
standard one used by trackers when they need a ready-made thug reputation as an
in with bands of thieves and murderers, and then that same cover is handed over
to the agents along with the case once the tracker’s job is done. That’s the
beauty of Jakob Barstow—he’s a chameleon; he can be anything the agent wearing
his skin needs him to be.

Bas is a tracker, not an agent. Trackers track.
They don’t do the set-them-up-then-take-them-down part. They do the sniffing
out and the pointing, and then they let the agents take over.

Except.

Bas knows the Barstow cover well enough to fake it.
He’s been Barstow plenty of times. Hell, he’d done most of the legwork on this
particular case, and he’d done it as Barstow. And someone needs to get into
Stanslo’s Bridge.

“Well, Barstow.” It sounds like a sneer. “Ye picked
up a tail.” The man jerks his chin down at the dead agent. “Thought you was
supposed to be all….” He smirks. “Well. Better ’n this.”

Bas doesn’t let it sting. Because the agent got a
touch careless in his relative inexperience with this kind of assignment, and
this guy got unbelievably lucky but is just too stupid to know the difference.
What a fucking waste.

Bas doesn’t answer the insult; he merely gives the
man a slow blink, flat and unimpressed. And he stares. And stares.

It unnerves the guy. It always unnerves the blustery,
petty, wannabe-tyrant types. Bas can see the man trying not to shift, but he
does eventually. And when the man realizes he’s on the edge of squirming, he
sets his scruffy jaw and glares.

“Name’s Fox,” he says, trying for arrogant. He gives
a pointed glance at the agent’s body. “And yer welcome. Fer takin’ care o’ yer
tail.” He lifts his chin, smug out of all proportion. “Followed ye all the way
from the inn, that ’un.” He grins, mean and with teeth that make Bas want to
rear back and grimace. “Not very saddle.”

Bas is pretty sure the guy means “subtle,” which,
yeah, okay, Aaron had maybe slipped up, contacting Bas one too many times while
they were in Harrowgate pretending not to know each other, and if Aaron had
been more careful, Bas wouldn’t have even seen him unless he’d looked for him.
So, okay, not subtle, but fucking hell, saddle, and why are all the
stupidest ones the ones with the biggest guns?

“Uh-huh,” Bas says, bored, and starts going through
the agent’s—Aaron’s—pockets. “Tell me, Fox,” he says, casual, as he digs
out Aaron’s billfold and the silver pocket watch the guy never seemed to stop
fiddling with. He slides them into his own pockets and waves down at the body.
“This guy look like a cutpurse to you?”

Bas watches Fox’s eyes as he—for the first time, Bas
would wager—takes in the fine cut of the trousers, the heavy nap of the coat.
Fox’s face slides into confusion first, then annoyance. Bas doesn’t wait for
him to think up a clever retort. Because he’d likely be waiting a good long
time. Saddle, for fuck’s sake. With a disdainful grimace he doesn’t try
to hide, Bas pulls the palm-sized flat oval of obsidian out of Aaron’s breast
pocket and lets it catch the greasy light coming through the cracks in the
boards behind the train station.

“That’s a scry mirror,” Fox says.

Bas rolls his eyes. “Not quite as stupid as
you look.”

Fox looks Bas in the eye with a crooked set to his
jaw. “He was scryTech.”

He was. Class 5. One of the reasons the Directorate
had insisted on sending him here, inexperience be damned. Harrowgate’s relay
office had been unreachable for months, and only a scryTech of the highest
class could hope to get a message across the span of the Territories without a
relay.

Bas rubs at his mouth and sighs. It’s all part of the
mystery he’d thought was confined to Stanslo’s Bridge, and he didn’t find out
any different until he got to Harrowgate. He saw hints the moment he stepped
off the train, but the semi-mummified body nailed to the relay office doors was
what made him understand that, whatever malevolence Stanslo’s Bridge was
exuding, it was leaking and spreading. There was no way to tell if the body was
the scryTech the Directorate required every relay office to employ, but it
wouldn’t really matter in the end. The place was boarded up and caked in dust,
and the body was wearing a Relay Office patch on the sleeve of its torn and
rotting coat. Bas is no necroTech, but he doesn’t think he’s too far off in
guessing the body has been there for months.

“They’re trying to cut off communication,” Aaron had
said—whispered it, really, urgent and avid-eyed in the back of the tavern where
he and Bas pretended to have just happened into a game of darts between two
strangers new in town. “The only way to get word in or out of here now is the
train, and Stanslo owns the line.”

Bas blows out a long, heavy breath and
surreptitiously makes sure Aaron's fake papers are still in his breast pocket.
It's possible his body will be found and sent home, in which case the
Directorate will know something went wrong.

“Yeah, he was scryTech.” Bas shrugs. “Which means
you’ve just made the Directorate dreadful unhappy, ’cause when it comes to dead
Techs, they don’t fuck around.” He gives Fox a level stare. “Well done, you.”

Fox’s eyes narrow down to slits. “He was following you.”

“And he would’ve lost me once I got on the
train to Stanslo’s Bridge, wouldn’t he.” Bas lets it rumble into a low snarl,
brusque. It shuts Fox up, so Bas shakes his head and says, “Look, we’ll keep it
between us, but if there’s shit coming down from the Directorate for this, I
intend to stand well clear of the stink.”

Fox seems to chew on that for a moment before his
thin mouth stretches out into a smarmy, brown-toothed grin. “Fuck that. Where
we’re goin’, Techs en’t no better’n anybody else and the Directorate en’t got
no reach.”

Bas merely lifts an eyebrow. And waits. And stares
some more.

Fox apparently takes it as a challenge this time,
because he puffs up and snaps, “Yeah, you’ll see, smartass. You’ll see things
that’d make coddled Techs and Directorate fucks cry for their mams. Stanslo’s
Bridge en’t got room for the delicate.”

Okay. So Fox is the kind of stupid that’ll turn out
to be useful, and all Bas’ll have to do is get him just the right amount of
riled. Because with one brash outburst, Fox has just pretty much confirmed all
Bas’s suspicions and several of his theories.

Before this part of the Territories was part
of the Territories, there were such things as Tech hunters and hired guns and
slave traders, and it isn’t like it’s ancient history. It had been happening in
Bas’s grandparents’ youth, and eradicating it is part of the reason the
Directorate came into the power it now enjoys. A hundred years ago, Bas’s
talents as a tracker might well have been pressed into service hunting down
Techs for the auction block. So it’s not exactly a stretch to imagine it hasn’t
been entirely stamped out in places where the Directorate’s presence isn’t much
of a presence. At least as far as the Tech part of the population, it’s why the
Directorate exists.

It’s why Bas signed with the Directorate right out of
the academy. When you have a little brother who’s not only psyTech but Class 4,
you learn to recognize and guard against exploitation and abuse at an early
age. Their parents had been careful, and Mo is more than capable now of taking
care of himself, but there was a time when Mo was small and unskilled and he’d
needed a big brother who knew what kind of spark to watch out for in another’s
eyes.

Bas sees that spark in Fox’s eyes a little too
clearly.

“So,” Bas drawls, sliding it into more syllables than
it needs and letting the corner of his mouth pull down, impatient. “Do I get to
see all this sometime this century?”

Fox doesn’t answer, just keeps staring at Bas, gaze
narrow and shining in the dark. Bas stares back, because what the hell, it’s
worked so far.

It works this time too. Fox looks away with a grunt
and an annoyed jerk of his head toward the station. “Got any bags?”

~

The train is nothing special. It surprises Bas. He’s
seen the drawings and schematics Kimolijah Adani was working on, has seen the
Tech working, the little model train zipping across the floor,
impossibly powered by nothing but gridTech somehow locked in a tiny crystal
attached to its chassis. No hooking into the Grid conduits, no wires strung to
a gridstation with a dozen or more gridTechs powering it. A gridmotor running
on gridstream that couldn’t be inside that crystal, because gridstream can’t be
directed like that. Except it was.

“It can be directed,” Resaniji Adani had told
Bas, almost sneering at him, like he should’ve known. Kimolijah Adani’s big
sister was fierce in her still-vibrant grief for her brother and her da. And a
little bit scary. “You just have to know how. Like bleeding, ’Lijah told me
once. You cut your hand and you’ve got blood leaking down your arm. You can’t
really aim it, right? It just sort of dribbles out and goes the path of gravity
and least resistance. But what if you opened an artery? Instead of dribbles you
get a geyser, and then it’s not about controlling the flow anymore, it’s about
directing it.”

She’d flicked at the little train with its tiny motor
and its tiny crystal making the wheels whirr and clack.

“’Lijah can open an artery and aim.”

This train… well. Bas has been expecting something
else.

It’s a steam locomotive with a few boxcars hooked to
it, and that’s it. Someone checks the last coupling and someone else pulls an
empty trolley down the ramp of the last car and sends a wave to Fox. Fox turns
to Bas. “C’mon, let’s go check for stowaways.”

There are none, and Bas honestly can’t imagine why
there would be, but he checks among the sacks of grains and barrels of ale and
feed. “Get a lot of stowaways, do you?” he asks Fox.

Fox rolls a gob of snot up through his sinuses and
horks it out the door into the dust. “Not from here.”

Bas stands beside the car amidst the smoke that chugs
from the idling engine and clings to the ground, and he thinks Well, this
just keeps getting weirder and weirder. He doesn’t say it, though.
Obviously.

They shut and lock the doors. With a smirk, Fox
chivvies Bas up the metal steps into the cab and directs Bas to the stoke scuttles
beside the fuel hatch.

“Yeah, I don’t think so,” Bas says, eyeing the
shovel.

Fox shrugs. “You wanna drive, then?”

Bas squints at the dials and levers and various
switches. He gives Fox a glare and picks up the shovel.

It’s loud once they get going, the thack-thack-thud
of the wheels on the tracks rhythmic enough that Bas uses its cadence to
dig-pause-chuck, dig-pause-chuck. The mindlessness of it is strangely soothing,
settling Bas’s head and dulling the anger at the complete waste of having to
leave that agent dead in an alley like a forgotten smudge of flotsam. Bas sinks
into the rhythm and the buzzing silence in his head and decides not to notice
how time just… slips. It’s good because the noise prevents talk, and the last
thing Bas wants to do is talk to this Fox. He ignores the dark, shapeless whirr
of desert vista winging by him and the passage of the minutes and then the
hours, and thinks of nothing but his grip on the shovel, the blisters he can
feel sprouting on his palms, the stretch and pull of muscle and sinew.

He resists the spiral of theories and conjecture that
pulls him down a path that will inevitably and invariably lead him to thoughts
of Kimolijah Adani. Because Bas has obsessed about it all for going on three
years now, and there’s no point in wasting time pondering a dead man. Better to
figure out how he got dead, and then, since Bas is here and all, planned or
unplanned, figure out a way to make someone pay for it. Bas doesn’t have time
or headspace for anything else. He needs to start being Jakob Barstow.

It’s the early hours when Fox gives Bas a “Ho! Belay
the fires, now” and Bas abruptly thumps back into his own head, peers around
him to get a look out the windscreen. He doesn’t see anything for a long
spell—just blank, dusty landscape and the sporadic stubble of scrub—and then he
does. A shabby shanty of a way station squats on a latticework of tracks in the
middle of the desert.

Fox brakes with a concentration of which Bas hadn’t
really thought him capable. “We switch here,” Fox says as they pull up to the
station, and Bas doesn’t have to ask to what. He can see the other train even
in the dark.

“Why?” he asks instead. “Why didn’t that train just
come out to Harrowgate?”

“’Cause it’s how it works. If you don’t wanna walk,
you’d best come on.”

Fox doesn’t wait for Bas, just jumps down from the
cab and heads off to the other train. Bas follows, taking in what he can. He
only really sees a black outline against a black sky, but he knows this is what
he’d expected to see back at the station in Harrowgate. He can smell it.

It’s all laced monochrome in the dark. The
silhouettes, when Bas blinks, are edged sharp behind his eyes in the blue-black
of gridTech, so thin he almost can’t discern it with the not-vision of his
tracking senses, but now that he’s not inhaling stoke smoke and rank sweat, he
can almost taste the faint-faint-faint pepper of ozone, and he knows,
he knows exactly what he’s looking at.

A dim blue current flitters in starts and stops over
the skin of the cab, giving Bas a glimpse at something almost bullet-shaped and
sleek; it loses the illusion of novelty and polish when Bas’s eyes adjust and
he sees the quill-like projections and bulky… something-or-other mounted on the
roof.

Bas doesn’t remember the spiky poles and conduit and
sparking wiring that crowns this locomotive as part of the little toy train he
saw back in Kimolijah Adani’s ruined workshop, but he remembers the drawings in
the notes over which Bas pored while he was trying to catch a whiff of a trail.
The poles and wires and flickers and flowing gridstream make the locomotive
look like it’s topped by a lustrous blue crown. With, you know, weird spiky
tines like a dilapidated fence and enough current to beef ten men on contact,
but whatever.

It looks like it’s been thrown together out of spare
parts. And it sounds like it’s on its last legs. The locomotive whines as Bas
and Fox approach it, spitting filaments of blue sparks all over the skin of it,
some of them shooting off in all directions and catching at whatever drift-scrub
rolls by on the steady breeze over the flat hardpan. It revs for a second, then
sputters out with a tinny, shrieking fizz.

“Don’t touch nothin’,” Fox cautions, motions for Bas
to stop where he is, and ventures ahead. “En’t ye got this thing goin’ yet?” he
yells, and someone inside the cab curses—a rather eye-popping stream of it—and
throws a wrench out through the open door. It just misses Fox’s head. Bas can
see Fox’s hand twitch toward the small four-barrel on his hip, but he only
snarls, “Knock it the fuck off, princess, else—”

“What d’you think I was trying to do?” the other
voice snaps. “Just hang fire, I’m almost there.”

Fox is pissed off, Bas can tell, but he doesn’t do
much more than fume. He side-eyes Bas, as though looking for a reaction, and
when he doesn’t get one, he calls, “Lowen?”

“Yeah!” comes another voice from inside the cab. Tools
clank, and that other voice curses again, and then someone stands silhouetted
in the dim light pouring from the open side of the cab. “He’s almost got it,”
the man tells Fox. He’s big, bigger than Bas, and his skin is as dark as stoke.

“I already heard that one.” Fox leans to the side and
spits. Again. “How long?”

The man—Lowen—shrugs and wipes his hands on a dirty
rag. “Needs to be soon. Can’t run for powerful long in the heat, and night’s
shinning out.”

“No shit. Why d’you think I asked?”

“It’s not like he’s not giving it his best go, Fox.
He doesn’t want to be stuck out in the middle of the desert all day any more
than you do.”

“Yeah, you keep coddlin’ the princess,” Fox grumbles
and jerks his chin at Bas.

Bas would really rather get a look at that engine,
but he can’t think of a good reason the hired gun he’s supposed to be would
care. So Bas follows and does as Fox tells him as they maneuver the steam engine
on the switch tracks and decouple the cars that hold the supplies they’ve
hauled here. It’s not as complex as Bas thought it might be, at least not for
him, since he’s not the one driving the engine. Fox looks like he knows what
he’s doing, but Bas nonetheless makes sure to stand well clear of anything that
looks like it might crush him or cut him in half when it moves.

The other train—the one Bas is already thinking of as
“the gridtrain”—is still where they left it, still shooting off sporadic sparks
and jets of gridstream, and there’s still the occasional spate of filthy
cursing coming from inside it. So Bas assumes whoever’s in there hasn’t yet got
it going.

“’S all we can do for now,” Fox says with a grim set
to his mouth, and then he spits. Again.

Bas tries not to roll his eyes as he follows Fox to
the tiny boxcar that apparently came with the gridtrain. It turns out to be a
hobo’s notion of a passenger car. Two shabby, knob-legged couches that look
like they came out of a brothel’s parlor line the sides. Fox flops onto one of
them and kicks up his feet. With something close to a fond smile, he reaches
behind the couch and pulls out a long, thick… gun, Bas supposes; has to be a
gun, though not like anything Bas has ever seen. There’s only one barrel, to
start, it looks more like ceramic than metal, and the trigger’s more like a
toggle and it’s wired. Fox trades it for the big eight-barrel street cannon
he’d been carrying, cradles it across his chest, and makes himself comfortable.

“Stay in the car,” he tells Bas. “You touch the wrong
thing, you fry, and I’ll have wasted a pain-in-the-ass trip for nothin’.” He
shoves his hat down over his eyes and doesn’t say any more.

Bas sits across from him with his leather pack at his
feet and stares out the open door at the desert dark. He doesn’t try to engage
Fox in chitchat. Bas thinks Fox is only good for the kind of information that
comes through gossip and griping, and Bas is not in the mood. Also, he already
thinks Fox is an asshole, and Bas has never managed to scrounge up the
inclination to suffer assholes. So Bas keeps quiet and watches dust and more
dust, and tries to pretend he doesn’t want to launch across the seats and rip
Fox’s face off for whatever part he played in getting hold of the designs for
that train and for what happened to the man who made them. Because that peppery
scrim of gridTech has been on the back of Bas’s tongue for a long time now, he
knows its blue-on-black shapes like he knows his own face, and he knows it came
from a young genius gridTech whose experiments and designs came to the wrong
attention and got him killed. The fact that these men are using those designs
like they have the right makes Bas’s teeth tighten and his fists clench.

It gets dangerous very quickly, the too-real
possibility that Bas will do something violent that he shouldn’t while Fox is
just lying there like some dirty little desert lord kipping as his minions
scurry to please him. But patience is the largest part of tracking, and though
it’s the part Bas likes the least, there’s no denying it’s the part that nearly
always pays off. And he needs to get into Stanslo’s Bridge. So Bas sets his jaw
and eventually goes back to the door, leans out of it, and eyes the locomotive.

That can’t be safe, he thinks, watching the
currents travel the length of the locomotive’s casing and wondering how anyone
inside it isn’t cooking. He remembers Kimolijah Adani’s commentary on the
drawings—safety and grounding and problems with containing the current—and Bas
supposes he’s seeing proof that it’s all been gotten around somehow, but he
can’t fathom how. Still, it’s happening, it’s real, it’s working.

Well. Bas supposes it’s been known to work, anyway—it
appears to have gotten out here on its own power, at least—but there’s
obviously a problem with it, or Bas assumes it wouldn’t be whining and stopping
like it is.

The sound of metal-on-metal doesn’t let up, a steady clang-clang-clang
ringing out over the bleak hardpan. Someone says something in a gruff,
irritated tone—Bas is pretty sure it’s Lowen—and someone else answers back in a
smoother, higher voice, young, but Bas can’t make out what either of the
apparently two men are saying. The clanging rings again, faster and more
urgent, then that second voice rises in both volume and intensity until the
first voice bellows something and the clanging stops. There are a few mutters,
and then Lowen throws open the side door of the locomotive and stomps out.

He doesn’t look as angry as his tone implied; he
looks concerned as he turns back to shout over his shoulder, “You’re running
out of time, damn it!”

Lowen opens his mouth, as though to retort, but he
pauses instead, shoulders slumping, head shaking in what looks like regret, and
he looks up at the sky. The banging and clanging starts up again. There are
sparks flying out from the open door now too. Bas can’t see much, but he can
hear, and whoever’s in that cab can curse like nothing Bas has ever heard, and
he’s lived on the road with rustlers and highwaymen, so that’s saying
something. The low, grinding strains of “Motherfucking, cocksucking son—of—a—bitch!”
in rhythm to the banging almost make Bas snort, but then there’s more
commentary on sons of whores and doing things with dogs no one should know
about, let alone do, and then there’s something about mothers and coyotes that
makes Bas widen his eyes and blink away the sordid mental picture with a rather
prudish grimace. So, all in all, it’s not hard for Bas to keep quiet, since
he’s already pretty much speechless.

Fox snorts behind him, and Bas can’t tell if it’s in
his sleep or in reaction to the filthy commentary.

More sparks fly out of the cab, and then there’s an
almighty buzzing sound that segues into a whine, and a blue glow blooms out
over the locomotive’s skin and the rigged lattice of wiring on its roof. The
cursing cuts off in favor of an exultant “Yes!” as the engine howls to
life, that blue glow narrowing into streams of crackling currents that feed
outward from the cab and go spidering up along all the conduit and wirework.

Lowen abruptly jolts back from it and to the side,
like it’s zapped him or something, but Bas thinks, if it had, any moves Lowen
would be making would be the jittery death-dance kind. That’s a heap of current
roping halfway freely all over the locomotive. That singular pepper-ozone taste
blooms at the back of Bas’s tongue, fills his mouth, and the gridstream pulses
with a blue-black phantasm underglow that Bas can’t see with his eyes but can
nonetheless see. Bas has to make himself remain cool and detached,
because he knew it, but to see it, to see what’s left of someone so
promising, to understand a man had been killed for it, and to see it used by
those that must be responsible….

Bas wonders if he’ll blow his cover if he just knocks
Fox galley-west for no reason, or even shoots him. It would fit right in with
the Jakob Barstow cover, surely, but it wouldn’t do the job he’d come here to
do. It would probably only get him dead or left out in the middle of the
desert, which is pretty much the same thing. Harrowgate is a long way behind
when you’re riding shank’s mare.

Lowen has drifted back, eyes still on the sparking
engine, when he pauses. With a sigh, deep and loud enough that Bas can hear it
from where he hangs out of the boxcar, Lowen shakes his head and ventures
closer to the engine. He stops when he reaches the door.

“Can you power it down so I can get those tools out
of the hatch?”

There’s a long moment of nothing until the other
voice says, “I don’t think I want to. What if I can’t start it again? And it’s
getting close.”

“I don’t know.” Lowen takes off his hat and scrubs at
his short dark hair. “Not exactly safe to—”

“Nothing about any of this is bloody safe, is
it? Just leave it. They’re not in the stream, so there shouldn’t be a problem,
and cutting the engine again isn’t worth the risk.”

Lowen squints up at the sky, eyes following a falcon
that circles overhead. “It’s only an hour or so ’til dawn and you haven’t been
wearing the bracelet since—”

“Yeah, I know, Lowen.”

Lowen pauses with a heavy sigh. “Can you make it?”

“I’ll have to, won’t I?”

Lowen seems to think that over for a moment,
obviously unhappy with the answer, but he nods anyway. “I’ll ride back in the
car,” he answers. “Could use the sleep anyway. Back ’er up and I’ll do the coupling.”

Bas doesn’t offer to help as Lowen directs the
locomotive over the switch tracks and hooks up the supply cars Fox had hauled
from Harrowgate. Again, it doesn’t take very long, so Bas can only assume it’s
a routine well-practiced, and it’s finished with minimal fuss.

Aching for a chance to have a look inside that
locomotive now that he’s watching it actually work—sort of—but afraid of
getting anywhere near the seemingly wild gridstream flowing all over it, Bas
only watches and thinks I was right.

“I think they killed him for his designs,” he’d told
the Directorate wonks, back when all this was just the bones of a case
submitted for analysis. “I think they got just enough information out of him in
exchange for contraband crystals to understand the potential of what he was
working on, and then they killed him for those unfinished designs half the
gridTech academia were salivating over.”

The deputy minister had made grumbling noises about this
is why Techs should fucking well listen when we tell them not to go
walking into shitstorms. Bas had merely nodded agreeably and accepted when
he was offered the case.

When the coupling is apparently complete and the
freight cars secure, Bas backs up to let Lowen into the tiny
boxcar-turned-passenger-car. Lowen gives Bas the once-over as he squeezes by
and flumps onto the couch opposite Fox.

“So.” Lowen relaxes back into the leaking cushions
and rubs his chapped hands together. “You’re the new guy.” He’s got one of
those strange guns too, and he props it in the corner near his elbow.

Bas only gives him a look from beneath the brim of
his hat and goes back to watching the gridstream quiver over the locomotive.

Oleg. One of the “recruiters” for Stanslo’s Bridge.
Bas had been working him and his partner, Dutter, for close to two years,
gaining their trust and building on his own fake reputation as a highwayman and
murderer, until Oleg had finally made the offer Bas had been waiting for.

“Suit yourself,” Lowen says then he too tugs his hat
down over his eyes and settles into the couch. He doesn’t cradle his gun the
way Fox does, but Bas thinks it would be a mistake to assume he couldn’t get to
it quick enough to make it not matter.

Bas snatches at the edge of the open door when the
train finally lurches into forward motion, and he leans against the side of the
car when it begins to catch its swaying rhythm. He leaves the door open. The
desert night air is cold enough he can see his breath, but he doesn’t want to
sleep like the other two and he doubts there’s coffee service.

It’s different than any train Bas has ever been on
before. Instead of the heavy ka-chunk ka-chunk of wheels on tracks,
there’s more of a wheezy hum, smoother somehow, and it just has a lighter feel
to it. Instead of the thick haze of stoke smoke and steam, there’s a hot reek
of burnt gridstream and a charge to the air. It’s sort of exhilarating, because
Bas has no doubt whatsoever he’s riding on a train that’s being powered solely
by gridTech, and he’s pretty sure he’s one of a very few to even see something
like this, let alone get a demonstration.

It takes a little bit, but it does eventually occur
to him that that’s likely the reason for the switch and the way station.
Harrowgate is isolated, yeah, and even more so now that there’s no more relay
office, but people do live there, and rumors do find a way of traveling long
distances. If Stanslo doesn’t want anyone outside of his little desert barony
to know he’s got what looks to Bas like a train that runs on independent
gridstream, then he’d do best not to let them see it at all.

I was right, Bas thinks again and blinks when
his jaw clamps too tight and his eyes narrow down to angry slits. Kimolijah
Adani was killed for his designs. And now I’m riding into hell’s teeth on one
of them.

~

The important thing to understand here is that Bas is
not in love with Kimolijah Adani. That would just be stupid. For one,
Kimolijah Adani is dead, so what would be the point? And anyway, Bas never even
met the man labeled a “whiz kid” by his academy professors and a “potentially
dangerous genius” by a select few Directorate personnel who learned rather
quickly that, if they felt the need to say such things, they should do so
outside Bas’s hearing. Which was only because Bas didn’t appreciate the
cavalier attitude to such a brilliant mind lost so tragically, and not because
Bas had or has any emotional attachment to a dead genius.

Clearly.

And, okay, he may have formed some kind of
weird, esoteric… connection or something, nothing based in reality, because in
reality you can’t make a connection with the dead. It’s just that Bas has been
studying Kimolijah Adani for nearly three years now, and a bit of vicarious
attachment is inevitable.

“Shy,” Kimolijah’s sister had told Bas, “but a bit of
a smartass when you got to know him.”

“Bloody feral on goal,” his crossball teammates had
professed, “but the first to offer a hand after a match, win or lose.”

“Smarter than anyone else in the room, even his
professors,” the academy minister had sighed sadly, “and yet practical everyday
life seemed a touch beyond Kimolijah. He spent so much time inside his own
head, you see. I don’t know if he’d have been able to even so much as buy a
loaf of bread if you sent him to a market full of bake shops.”

Bas thinks all of it is very, very close but not quite
on the mark. He’s seen the journals, he’s read the diaries, he’s pored over the
schematics and the notes and the equations. He’s seen a limitless mind unfold
over blotted pages and doodled margins that were never meant to be seen by
anyone but Kimolijah Adani himself, and the personality that had wedged itself
determinedly inside the barbs and whorls of the hastily scrawled commentary had
somehow spoken to Bas.

It said: the most shocking thing about it is that
all this unchartable genius could be contained in a single mind.

It said: and no one really gets it, because
all the snarky wit and single-minded drive to achieve is obscured beneath the
spiky characters turned to scratched brilliance with every stroke of inked
theorems and hypotheses laid over the individuality within the intellect.

And it said: this is a mind men would kill for.

It made Bas view with bitter regret the one-year gap
between the time he graduated from the academy and the time Kimolijah started.
But for a few years and a few miles between them while they grew up on opposite
sides of Knapston, they might have met, spoken, become….

Who knows?

So fine, okay, Bas may have fallen into some
kind of… overly attached fondness, but if he had, it was with the mind he’d
watched unfold all over those journals and blueprints. Grand and dazzling and
horrible and tragic. No one would likely ever know the scope of the potential
that had been lost with Kimolijah Adani. So it shouldn’t surprise anyone that
Bas formed a bit of a… okay, it’s an obsession.

What of it? Where’s the harm? It’s not like it hurts
anyone, and it certainly kept Bas on task and searching when real information
ran scarce. Never fall for a mark, never fall for a victim, the number
one rule in Directorate covert ventures, but this isn’t the same. Kimolijah
Adani was never a mark, and it doesn’t count when the victim is already dead.
The Directorate isn’t looking for him. They’re looking for—Bas is looking
for—Mariella Crocker, Class 4 weatherTech, who disappeared almost four years
ago and whose trail Bas eventually tracked to Castle City. Just east of
Harrowgate. The connection to Stanslo is something the Directorate believes;
the one to Kimolijah Adani is something Bas feels.

Anyway, it’s not exactly the first time Bas has
halfway fallen for someone who lives only between the pages of a book. So what?

It gets dreadful hot powerful quickly when the sun
goes up. It takes no time at all for the heat to rise and make Bas sweat
beneath his leather duster. He keeps the door open. It doesn’t make it any less
hot, but the wind that slides in with the train’s acceleration at least moves
the air around. The heat and the rhythm and the sway make him a little sleepy,
and he thinks about using some of Jakob Barstow’s dickish tendencies and
dumping either Fox or Lowen off one of the couches—preferably Fox—but he
decides it’s probably not a good idea to lower his guard enough to sleep in
their company anyway.

When the boredom starts to get to him, he pulls out a
few of the illobooks he’d brought with him to pass the time on the train out to
Harrowgate. He’s read them all before, but he didn’t want to risk bringing and
ruining new ones. A guilty pleasure, or maybe it’s more like escapism of a
sort. Illobook heroes, after all, never have to do paperwork or get nagged by
their mothers or have to make a stop, dog-tired, at the markets before they can
go home because all the food they’d left in the pantry before the latest
three-month assignment has surely sprouted legs by now and wandered off to find
better accommodations. Compared to the decidedly unglamorous life of a
Directorate tracker, illobook heroes have it pretty damned good. Directorate
trackers, after all, stay dead when they take a mortal wound on the job; there
are no miraculous recoveries explained in unlikely exposition and over-the-top
dialogue in the first few panels of the next issue.

The book’s pages flutter in the wind, so Bas angles
at a slant to block it. He sits right beside the door and squints at the
colorful artwork against the sunlight, pulling his scarf up over mouth and nose
to minimize the dust and heat sliding into his lungs.

Magic Man, year 5, series 2, issue 9. Bas
traces the bold lines of the colorful illustrations as Casius Cruel threatens
the honest, hardworking citizens of Crosstown and Magic Man grandly thwarts
him. For probably the first time in his life, the illobooks don’t hold Bas’s attention
for very long.

He leans out for as long as he can, wind and dust in
his face, to have a look at the engine. The odd-angled poles and conduit he’d
only seen silhouetted a few hours ago now wink in the sun and look even
shabbier and more idiot-rigged than they had before. Atop and dead center of
the engine’s cab sits what looks to Bas like some kind of gun turret, but he
can’t imagine defense against bandits would be a problem out here. He looks up
at the sky, but all he sees is another circling falcon. Or maybe it’s the same
one, following the train. Either way, it’s not exactly like it’s any kind of
threat, so it still doesn’t explain what a turret’s doing on top of a train.

It’s harder to see the gridstream that flows over the
locomotive in the daylight, but Bas can see it, and even if he couldn’t,
he can taste it. He wonders exactly how it’s running. Gridstream, of course,
but it would take at least six or seven Class 5 gridTechs to power it enough
just to start it; he can’t even guess how many it would take to run it this
long. And running a gridstream engine in the desert heat…. Bas wonders what
kind of heat sink they’re using on this thing, because it couldn’t possibly be
a cool-air system, not out here.

He thinks about the dynamic crystals in Kimolijah
Adani’s designs and how they were a new discovery only several years back, how
the Directorate medTechs did some experimenting with them until it killed two
of them and the Directorate subsequently and immediately banned them
altogether, because Bas wasn’t kidding before—when it comes to the safety of
its Techs, the Directorate can be a protective, possessive, mother-bear bitch.

He thinks about how Kimolijah Adani was using the
crystals in his designs anyway, and how those designs made Bas almost hyperventilate
at the possibilities when he’d had a look at them. He thinks about how there’s
only one source for those crystals, and how Kimolijah Adani and his da somehow
ended up nothing but blackened bones smoldering away in the workshop behind
their tinker’s shop after a cryptic series of communications with the man who
owns that source.

“A fucking overload,” Resaniji had said. “Like
’Lijah was some kind of tweenie moron who didn’t know more about the Grid and
how it works than the goddamned ‘experts’ at the Directorate and anyone else in
the world.”

Having scrutinized Kimolijah’s work and spoken with
his professors, Bas wasn’t able to argue. He’d seen it—in every diary he
studied, in every schematic, in every theory and equation he couldn’t quite
understand, but he’d known what he was looking at was big and unique and near
blinding in its virtuosity.

There are idea people and there are engineers, and then
there are the builders and testers, and rarely do those separate entities
coalesce in one person. Kimolijah Adani was that rarity. He thought things up
and then he built them, and if the parts to build them didn’t exist, he built
those too.

Looking at the gridstream climbing all over that
engine, knowing where the design and the gridTech itself came from, Bas feels a
deep, vicious anger bubble in his gut. One way or another, Baron Stanslo is
responsible for a Directorate agent lying dead in a dusty alley so horribly far
from home. And now there’s no doubt in Bas’s mind that Stanslo is responsible
for Kimolijah Adani and his da dying in their own workshop, not even enough
left of them to bury.

Someone needs to pay.

By the time Bas feels the deceleration pulling at his
ribs, the sun is starting to slide lower in the sky. They’d gotten underway
right around dawn, and Bas guesses it’s late afternoon by now, three or four
hours maybe ’til full-dark. It’s taken him this long to realize he hasn’t had
anything to eat since lunch yesterday.

He’s dragged out and sore and hungry, so when he
leans out and spots a smudge of color in the limitless buff of desert sand, he
thinks whatever’s coming, he’ll figure out how to make it work. That’s got to
be some kind of station up ahead; it’s too rectangular to be part of the
desert. Bas can see a shabby little town creeping out behind it, a small ridge
overlooking it, and the continuation of the tracks sidling out into the blank
beyond, all the way out to the Dead Lands, for all Bas knows.

Stanslo’s Bridge.

Fox startles from his hours-long doze with a thick
snort and tips his hat back up from where it had been covering his eyes. He
looks around, blinking and squinting, then gives Bas a sour once-over. Lowen
wakes more smoothly, sitting up and stretching and sliding Bas a grin Bas
thinks might be mocking, but he doesn’t know, so he only stares.

Turns out it is a station. Well, at least an attempt
at one. More like a big semi-open pavilion with thin walls to deflect the wind
and some kind of rickety annex jutting askew from its side, but Bas supposes
it’s the closest to a station as is possible all the way out here. Outbuildings
are scattered around it like a child’s blocks. Lofted, towerlike contraptions
dot the place at irregular intervals, tall arms stretched in a V with wires strung across and humming
with gridstream, bellies inset with great wooden tanks. They look like the
soulless mechanical Deathbringers from Planet Horror—year 14, series 2,
issue 5. Bas wants to think of them as stunted water towers, maybe, which would
make sense in the desert, but water towers draw up from the ground with the
tank at the top; these look almost upside-down. And anyway, where do you get
water in the first place to put in them?

They pull into the meager shelter of the station, and
though it’s all rather flimsy, still Bas can feel the immediate drop in
temperature once they’re out of the midafternoon sun, can breathe a touch
easier as the train crawls to the center of the shoddy station and wheezes to a
halt. The blue flicker of gridstream is brighter now, and it flares to almost
blinding for several seconds before there’s a high-pitched whine and everything
goes out, stops, and then there’s nothing. It’s like some weird kind of
suspension, a pause in movement and breath and thought while the green ghosts
of blue gridstream fade at the backs of Bas’s eyes and the burnt-sky scent of
it winnows back down into the dry, prickling tang of empty desert air.

He’s eager, but Bas tries not to show it. He stands
from where he’s been sitting on the floor, half dangling out the open door, but
that’s all he does. He waits for Lowen or Fox to make a move. He probably
shouldn’t have, because the first thing Fox does when he’s done stretching and
grumbling about an empty belly and not enough sleep is to point his weird gun
at Bas. He’s got a glint in his eye that makes Bas think he’s just looking for
a reaction, so Bas doesn’t give him one.

Bas lifts an eyebrow. “Kinda why I’m here.” He
doesn’t go for his weapon; he’s an ace shot, but not much on the draw. He keeps
his hands still.

Fox props the gun over his shoulder with a smirk, his
mouth twisted sour again, like he’s disappointed Bas didn’t give him an excuse.
“Is it, then,” he says, narrow-eyed, and he tilts a look at Lowen as he brushes
past Bas out of the car.

Bas wants to ask what the hell that’s supposed to
mean, but he doesn’t think he should. He doesn’t get a chance, anyway.

“Where is Stanslo?” a shaky voice asks as soon as Fox
steps down. It sounds like the one from before, the one that was inside the
locomotive, and so must be the engineer, but Bas can’t see from this angle, and
he doesn’t want to take his eyes off Lowen.

“I reckon he seen the train pull in like everyone
else,” Fox answers, a lethargic drawl. “He’ll be along.”

The other voice barks, “No, I need to see him now,
it’s crawling up my fucking arm!”

“Then you should be better at your fucking job,”
Fox says. Still, he growls an order to someone named Merrin to go fetch the
boss.

Footsteps, and then everything goes quiet.

Bas just keeps staring at Lowen, trying to look
bored, and then he really is bored, because it takes for-fucking-ever. But that
could just be because time has seemed to slow down and center on the fact that
Bas is actually here, in Stanslo’s Bridge, where he’s been trying to get a foot
in for two years.

He knows he’s sweating, and he hopes the heat is a
good enough excuse because he really doesn’t think it’s a good idea to show any
kind of weakness right now. So he thinks about the complete hardcase Jakob
Barstow is supposed to be, lets his eyes go cold and his shoulders relax and
his fingers make a show of twitching just at the tip of the butt of his
six-barrel, tucked up into its beaten holster at his hip.

“Gonna stretch my legs,” Bas says, going for a lazy
drawl, satisfied with the roughness of his throat from the dust. It gets into
you here, grit in your nostrils and sand crunching between your molars.

Lowen merely shrugs, giving Bas another grin, and
though he does reach over and pick up his gun, he doesn’t point it at Bas or
object.

Bas waits it out for a full count of twenty before he
makes a show of rolling his eyes and sighing. He turns slowly and steps down
from the car onto the oiled dirt of the station’s floor.

He sees very little that tells him anything of
value—just a bunch of mechanical equipment and spools of wire, and a wall on
the far side, the door open and hanging crooked, through which Bas can see more
equipment and scattered… stuff. He mentally labels it workshop and decides to have a look as soon as he thinks he can get
away with it. Bas stares around the station, taking in what he can: the shelves
and the tools and the crates of parts and conduit, the obviously half-finished
projects sitting on benches and puking out wires. It stays quiet for long
enough that Bas wonders if this is the end of the world and Bas is the only one
left in it, with only Fox and Lowen for company. And isn’t that a
depressing thought.

“Oh, grand,” a voice mutters, kind of thready and
just to Bas’s side.

Bas hadn’t seen him sitting there before. Slumped,
really, ass parked on the metal step that leads into the cab of the locomotive,
scuffed boots planted on the oiled dirt floor, gloved hands dangling between
bent knees, and a curious expression tipped up at Bas.

“Another one,” the guy says, a twist to his mouth. He
gives Lowen a dirty look. “You didn’t tell me this was what Fox was
picking up in Harrowgate.” He shakes his head and turns back to Bas, a flat
once-over. “And here I’d thought the apparently endless supply of assholes had
finally run out.”

~

And that’s how Bas comes face-to-face with two
dead men in less than a day.

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